- #1
wotanub
- 230
- 8
This may sound weird if you can't relate. So I managed to squeak through my entire undergrad career and get accepted to a "top 10" PhD program without ever actually reading a Physics textbook cover to cover.
I basically just cherry-picked the topics I needed to do problems sets and skipped the rest. Now I'm ready for grad school in the Fall, but quals have got me spooked. How am I supposed to pass if I've never been through the whole Griffiths? (neither one) So I set out to try and read some textbooks to get/stay sharp, but I feel like the words are bouncing off my eyes --like I'm not learning anything. It was so easy with an instructor to explain it before reading it, but now it's like I get stuck on one page for half an hour because I'm having trouble focusing ("wait, what did I just read again?")
Surely someone knows the feeling I'm talking about. All this just to ask... does anyone who has experienced this focus problem have any tips on self-teaching from a book? I'm not well suited to this learning style., and it doesn't help that some of these textbooks are pretty dry.
I basically just cherry-picked the topics I needed to do problems sets and skipped the rest. Now I'm ready for grad school in the Fall, but quals have got me spooked. How am I supposed to pass if I've never been through the whole Griffiths? (neither one) So I set out to try and read some textbooks to get/stay sharp, but I feel like the words are bouncing off my eyes --like I'm not learning anything. It was so easy with an instructor to explain it before reading it, but now it's like I get stuck on one page for half an hour because I'm having trouble focusing ("wait, what did I just read again?")
Surely someone knows the feeling I'm talking about. All this just to ask... does anyone who has experienced this focus problem have any tips on self-teaching from a book? I'm not well suited to this learning style., and it doesn't help that some of these textbooks are pretty dry.